It sounds like the work of a clever modder, but it’s actually Mode 7′s new game. It’s called Frozen Endzone, and it’s available on Steam Early Access right now.

In Frozen Synapse, players are tasked with moving their simulation troops in turn-based, five-second intervals and eliminating the enemy team. Frozen Endzone takes that basic formula to the grid iron and challenges players to use their robot players to get the ball safely across the goal line (or stop the other team when on defense).

See how it plays out in the lengthy Early Access trailer below:

The basic game is available for $25, with tiers that bring the cost all the way up to $99. And everyone who orders a copy, basic or otherwise, receives an additional Frozen Endzone Steam code to gift to a friend.

As we reported on Monday, 2012′s MineCon expo was held this past weekend at Disneyland Paris and saw the announcement of Minecraft 1.5 aka the Redstone Update. The event was also used as a venue for several prominent indie developers to make presentations — lectures, if you will — in front of a room full of attendees. PC Gamer was among those in the audience and captured the presentations for posterity. Being the affable bunch they are, the magazine’s staff have made the videos available online.

First up are Mark Morris and Chris Delay of Introversion, developer of Uplink, Darwinia, and Prison Architect:

Videos are also available of a few other indie devs talking about their process, challenges, inspirations, and more. Check them all out below.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/watch-indie-devs-take-the-stage-at-minecon-2012/feed/0Frozen Synapse: Red Adds Co-op, Way More Contenthttp://www.gamefront.com/frozen-synapse-red-adds-co-op-way-more-content/
http://www.gamefront.com/frozen-synapse-red-adds-co-op-way-more-content/#commentsWed, 30 May 2012 18:57:16 +0000Phil Hornshawhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=169622Now you can strategize with a friend.

Frozen Synapse is a very cool indie strategy title that came out last year, but developer Mode 7 wasn’t satisfied with its extensively complex and rewarding office firefight gameplay. Instead, it just plopped out Frozen Synapse: Red, a DLC pack that reshuffles the whole game to include cooperative play.

That means you can attack all of Frozen Synapse’s complex and brainy missions with a friend, and on top of that, the DLC pack includes another 15 levels for your enjoyment. Oh, and there are a bunch of other new things — like mutators, multipalyer modes, the addition of riot shields (Oh s–t, you’ll be saying when you realize how that’s going to screw with you in-game) and deployable cover, and a recasting of the whole game in red rather than blue. It’s cooler than you think.

But even if you don’t purchase the Red DLC — it’s $9.99, currently on sale slightly on Steam — and you own Frozen Synapse, you still get something for free care of Mode 7. That’s the local Hotseat multiplayer mode, plus the ability to use non-randomized multiplayer maps and set timed turns (because those can go on a bit).

AND — Mode 7 says that DLC owners and non-DLC owners will be able to play with each other in multiplayer without any divisions, including in co-op. Which is basically the coolest thing ever.

You can grab Frozen Synapse and its DLC on Steam right here. It’s on sale. Check out our review for more.

Note: this is not a Humble Bundle. This is some other guys making something that is very much like a Humble Bundle. We’re cool with this, because the more there are things that are like a Humble Bundle, the better.

This is the Little Big Bunch, created by Get Games. It comes with Explodemon, Frozen Synapse, NS Soccer 5, Munch’s Odyssey and Serious Sam Double D. You pay what you want for it, and you decide how much of your payment goes to the developers or the charity Games Aid.

It is, of course, not a bad deal. Frozen Synapse, for one, is a $15 game, so you’ll probably be getting the whole bundle for less than what that one game is worth. Pretty good. Get the Little Big Bunch here.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/pay-what-you-want-for-the-little-big-bunch-indie-bundle/feed/010 Great Games You Probably Didn’t Play in 2011, But Shouldhttp://www.gamefront.com/10-great-games-you-probably-didnt-play-in-2011-but-should/
http://www.gamefront.com/10-great-games-you-probably-didnt-play-in-2011-but-should/#commentsThu, 08 Dec 2011 19:38:35 +0000Phil Hornshawhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=142536In a year of great games, some phenomenal offerings got overshadowed. Here's what you're missing.

We’ve seen a huge number of pretty great games in 2011. The triple-A category has been bursting with sequels that are actually good, ranging from solidly awesome multiplayer offerings in games such as Driver: San Francisco, Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, to awesome single-player-only campaigns in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

With the great titles coming non-stop from Dead Space 2 and Portal 2 straight through to Skyrim, it has been easy to miss even more great games that have been overshadowed by the biggest players in the industry. Smaller downloadable titles, indie masterpieces and the generally overlooked titles were waiting in the wings as the big guys took center stage. So we’ve compiled a list of titles that you might have missed but are definitely worth a look.

10. Puzzle Dimension

The “dimension” part of the Puzzle Dimension title is the key here. On its face, the game is pretty simple: you’ll roll a ball around platform-based levels, attempting to gather flowers that will open a portal to the next level. Some platforms are icy; others break beneath you. There’s no time limit and no hurry — it’s just you, the puzzle, and your requirement of figuring out how to traverse it in one attempt.

But the puzzles of Puzzle Dimension, as you might have guessed, are three-dimensional. Sometimes you’ll roll off the edge of a platform to fall to one below it; other times, gravity will shift beneath you as you roll around a circular path. You’ll really need to flex your spacial reasoning muscles to continue advancing in Puzzle Dimensions, and the game doesn’t make it easy on you, either.

9. PayDay: The Heist

Mix Left 4 Dead’s cooperative-style first-person shooter gameplay with every heist movie you’ve ever seen and you get PayDay: The Heist. It’s a downloadable title from Sony and Overkill Software that borrows liberally from the Left 4 Dead concept — four players, hordes of enemies, objectives to complete — but with a lot of style of its own. You and three friends don clown masks and participate in some pretty intense criminal activity, like bank robbery, hostage-taking, prisoner breakouts and more. If you’ve ever wanted to recreate some of the best scenes from Point Break or Heat, this is your chance.

With a price tag of only $20, PayDay can be a great time when played with friends. A high number of unlockable weapons and abilities allow players to differentiate their styles over time, and the heists always stay tense and exciting. If you’ve got three FPS fan friends, you should definitely get them to pick up PayDay along with you.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/10-great-games-you-probably-didnt-play-in-2011-but-should/feed/4Snag Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, Now With Bonus SpaceChemhttp://www.gamefront.com/snag-humble-frozen-synapse-bundle-now-with-bonus-spacechem/
http://www.gamefront.com/snag-humble-frozen-synapse-bundle-now-with-bonus-spacechem/#commentsWed, 05 Oct 2011 19:45:03 +0000Phil Hornshawhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=129022Another $15 game gets thrown in to a Humble Indie Bundle that will run you less than $5.

As if you might have needed more reason to go check out the latest Humble Indie Bundle (if “low price” and “good games” weren’t reason enough), there’s yet another bonus game available to purchasers. It’s SpaceChem, and it’ll put your high school chemistry lessons to work along with your spacial reasoning and puzzle-solving abilities. Expect to use your brain.

SpaceChem currently goes for $14.99 on Steam. Frozen Synapse, the main course of the bundle, will run you $24.99 on Steam. Or you can head over to HumbleBundle.com and pay whatever you want. If it’s more than the average paid price ($4.66!), you get Frozen Synapse AND SpaceChem, plus the entire Frozen Byte bundle, too. Crazy good deal, you fool. Go buy it.

Last time there was a Humble Indie Bundle, it made better than $1 million in less than a week and loosed six PC indie titles on an unsuspecting public. Before that, there was the Humble Frozenbyte bundle, which packed five games from developer Frozenbyte, for the low cost of “pay whatever you want.”

Well, there’s a new bundle in town, and it’s still priced competitively by your choice. And a portion of the proceeds still goes to charity. This time, you get Frozen Synapse, a turn-based strategy game that normally goes for about $25. You can get it for as low as a buck if you like, but if you pay around $5, you get the entire Frozenbyte Bundle thrown in as well. That’s six games. And it’s totally worth it.

In games of strategy, there’s always the struggle of visualization. You might think you have the perfect tactics for a given situation, but you never know, especially in Strategy genre video games. Will my marines engage those zerglings at a distance, or will the gap get closed any my forces shredded? Will the enemy continue as I expect or route left and take the flank? And most importantly, Can I win this battle?

In most strategy games, you never know. Part of the skill is in the imagination — seeing what your opponent will do and seeing how your forces will react. In Frozen Synapse, though, you have all the information the next five seconds can provide, because you can simulate (almost) every possibility.

Frozen Synapse is a turn-based strategy game from indie developer Mode 7 Games, and your role in each of its simulated, computer AI-type battles is to issue orders to your forces. The game is turn-based in that after every set of orders is issued, they’re executed for five seconds, and then everything stops and you have the opportunity to issue orders again. Both sets of forces — you and your opponent get all the time in the world to tell your troops what to do, but once you hit the button to commit to your plan, both get executed simultaneously, and just about anything can happen.

And while it’s a complex game with a lot of rules about who will win what combat under which circumstances, Frozen Synapse takes all the guess work out of the game at the same time that it gives you the tools to make the best decisions you can in every situation: the simulation. When you issue orders to your team, which are displayed in the form of waypoints along a line that represents that character’s path through the battlefield, you’re able to hit a button and watch the next five seconds of the battle play out. You can see what your forces will do as they move around, and how long everything will take them. You can work out hinks in your strategy, and you can even issue orders to your opponents’ characters to simulate their possible actions, then make necessary adjustments.

The simulation at once makes the game very easy and very hard, because it doesn’t take much to start you overthinking your own strategy. You can simulate a hundred possible actions by the enemy and they may still surprise you. But you never need to exactly worry about whether you’re going into a battle primed to lose, whether your character is out of cover or will be intercepted by a certain foe, because you can always test it — so the rules of the game come a lot more naturally.

Each of Frozen Synapse’s levels takes place in a sort of top-down office building, and each presents players with multiple different classes, ranging from close-range shotgunners to wall-destroying RPG gunners. There’s a single-player campaign, which presents a story that’s a bit out there and hard to follow in that slightly overwrought tech-world kind of way, but it boils down to one group attacking an oppressive corporation that controls everything in a city. Though there’s quite a lot in the way of world-building babble about the various aspects of the world that can be hard to understand (the characters you control are called shape forms, for example, and they’re something of a mix between real and AI programs), but the gist is easy enough to follow, and you still feel a bit strained when you’re ordered to gun down civilian non-combatants and the like. The campaign is fairly long on its own, which is nice.

The real fun is in Frozen Synapse’s many multiplayer modes, however. Here you can take on other players in a number of game types and put your tactical skills to the test. The games are generally pretty fun and tactically diverse, too — maps are randomly generated as are player locations. This can be both positive and negative: on the one hand, no two games are ever alike and you’ll always need to be on your toes in every match, for every turn. On the other, positioning can often make or break a match even at its outset; finding yourself in an indefensible position with nowhere to go can and does happen fairly frequently.

The only other major issue I encountered during my time with Frozen Synapse were its occasionally painful load times. Even when playing alone, there were times when the loading of my orders into the game engine to execute them seemed to take a painfully long time. This wasn’t game-breaking, by any stretch, it just seemed as though at points my system was taxed by Frozen Synapse more than I was being let on; at others, everything seemed to function just fine.

But that’s a quibbling with a game that is otherwise a refreshing reworking of tactical gaming. Like a good game of Chess, quality Frozen Synapse matches leave you hungry to improve, not frustrated with a loss. The game doesn’t always make you feel like you were outwitted when you lose because of some slightly game-breaking choices — namely, random level generation and positioning — but on the whole the game feeds the intellect and still includes lots of little digital guys getting shot and blowing up.

Pros:

Thoughtful, interesting tactical action

Cool look

Engaging campaign

Lots of online multiplayer support

Solid price

Requires you to be tactical without being taxing and requiring a lot of memory for rules

Cons:

Story and writing are a little convoluted

Some inordinate load times

Randomly generated nature of maps means starting positioning can cost you a match